St. Joe Has Land -- And Big Plans

Florida's Top Private Landowner Has Been Developing Or Selling Parts Of Its Delaware-sized Holdings -- But Has Kept Secret Much Of What It Wants To Do.

February 8, 2004|By Sean Mussenden, Sentinel Staff Writer

PORT ST. JOE -- More pine groves are falling each day in a forest that flanks the last of Florida's undeveloped coastline.

The trees are being replaced by million-dollar beachfront homes and business parks, bringing irrevocable change to the state's largely rural Panhandle. It's the work of the St. Joe Co., which has transformed itself from a vast timber concern into a Wall Street-minded developer eager to build on or sell its 1.1 million acres of Panhandle land, an area about the size of Delaware.

Never in modern Florida has a developer controlled so much raw land, and not since Walt Disney came to Central Florida has one company held similar power to transform and bring unprecedented growth to such a large region of the state.

In doing so, the company is moving a coastal highway inland and bringing a new regional airport to the middle of an isolated forest. It has flexed its political might to rewrite statewide growth-management laws and growth blueprints in the tiniest of Panhandle counties.

Despite this, St. Joe -- the state's largest private landowner -- has kept many of its plans a secret.

With a leadership team adept at navigating the political process from the county courthouse to the state Capitol, not a single elected leader has demanded that St. Joe reveal all its ideas upfront to help plan for the coming growth. And the company has no obligation or interest in doing so.

"They are the he-coon, the 800-pound gorilla," said David Richardson of Gulf County, more than half of which St. Joe owns. "They are our Disney."

ST. JOE'S EDWARD BALL LEGENDARY

For years, Richardson worked as a shift operator at the big paper mill in Port St. Joe, a blue-collar town at the Gulf of Mexico's edge.

Before the St. Joe Paper Co. changed into the St. Joe Co., its mill was the cornerstone of a financial empire controlled by Edward Ball, one of the most powerful men in the Panhandle's history.

Under Ball, St. Joe Paper owned plants from Texas to Ireland. It controlled banks and railroads and even a sugar company. And it steadily acquired thousands of acres of forests, marshy flats, riverbanks, natural springs and beachfront.

Land-speculation fever gripped Florida in the 1920s, and Ball, armed with a checkbook from brother-in-law Alfred I. du Pont, navigated dusty Panhandle roads to snap up thousands of acres.

As the rest of Florida boomed, the company jealously guarded the more than 1 million acres that Ball amassed, rebuffing development offers -- even from a man named Walt Disney searching for a place to put his first Florida theme park, according to Panhandle lore.

"I don't deal with carnival folk," Ball is said to have told Disney. The company was in the business of growing pine trees to feed its hungry mills.

After decades directing the company, Ball died in 1981. And in the mid-1990s, his successors began to squabble about the direction of the company. A tightly held public enterprise, St. Joe was not making enough money, some argued.

The paper business was cast off in 1996, the St. Joe mill sold to a new owner, leaving the company with a lot of land and little use for pine trees.

A new development-minded leadership team was brought in 1997, headed by the former head of The Walt Disney Co.'s development arm, Peter Rummell, who masterminded the planned community of Celebration.

Suddenly, the new owner of the Port St. Joe mill shut it down, putting Richardson and thousands of his co-workers on the street.

Richardson found a new job, one that, despite his almost total lack of experience in the field, did not require him to return to college. The former mill worker became Gulf County's first full-time planner.

Today, he finds himself reviewing his old boss's development plans in Gulf County. But in at least one way, he still works for St. Joe, because the company's top Gulf County executive sits on the county planning board.

In the Panhandle, many people see property rights as sacred.

"Right now, the present attitude is if it's your land, and you have the resources to develop it, go ahead and do it. Just make sure you stay within the rules," Richardson said.

Some say St. Joe developments are bringing jobs for carpenters, plumbers and others to one of the poorest regions of the state.

"It's nice and quiet here and all, but I don't see what'd be wrong with some more development," said Wade Maxwell, 48, who works odd jobs and construction in Apalachicola. "There might be more jobs."

`FLORIDA'S GREAT NORTHWEST'

When St. Joe's new leadership team first arrived in 1997, the only comprehensive record of its 1.1 million acres of land had been scrawled on an old, creased gas-station map, company spokesman Jerry Ray said.

But St. Joe knew where to start -- it had 7.5 miles of undeveloped beachfront, some of the last privately owned pristine beach in Florida.